Personal
Personal
Sorry for not posting more often. My schedule has been brutal over the last few months. There's not much going on in my life right now other than work. Pictures of my new hobby are on my moblog. The aquarium is coming along slowly (a good thing in the marine aquarium world). I'm stuck on the ship for duty today. Grrrrrr.
I recently went to the National Homebrewer's Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the really cool events was the beer breakfast. The beer breakfast at Sean Bolan's Pub was outstanding. Four courses paired with four different beers. The food was all cooked in beer too.
First Course: Freshly baked bread with Boddington Herb Butter paired with Stoudt's Hefeweizen.
Second Course: Heavyweight Biere d'Arte Scotch Eggs with Allgauer Cambonator Dopplebock.
Third Course: 1/2 chicken on the bone marinated in Clay Pipe Hefeweizen with Heavy Seas Small Craft Warning. (See the picture)
Final Course: Cold Framboise and Honeydew soup with Oxford Class Raspberry Wheat beer.
They also let us keep the glasswear. I got a nice Chimay glass. The dopplebock was fantastic and I'm going to have to find some more of that.
Yumm.
Pictures on my Moblog.
THIS is a fun site. It's kind of addictive. Check it out.
Today is
Big Brew day. To celebrate I made my first all-grain beer from my Jenny's Red Ale recipe. Pictures on my
moblog.
I got the all grain brewing system that I ordered today. All except the burner. It'll be here the end of next week. Anyway it's huge. Two big rubbermaid coolers and a 30 Quart brewpot.
Picture Here
I ordered a bunch of ingredients AND a 14 gallon conical fermenter so I should do my first all-grain batch next weekend.
Just got a brand new cell phone. It's a Motorola V710 with a camera so I figured I'd get me a
moblog to go with it.
All throughout the deployment I was excited about getting a multimedia PC when I got home. Well I'm home and I don't need one now. I already have one.
Let me explain. It seems that the good folks at TiVo added some of the features that I wanted in a PC to their networking software. Now I can stream or download video recorded on my TiVo to my computer and watch it or even burn it to a DVD to watch later.
No need to buy a new PC.
Cool Stuff TiVo!
The Colonial Ale Smiths & Keggers, that is. I went to my first meeting on Thursday at the St. George Brewing Company here in town. Met a lot of local homebrewers and tasted a lot of good beer. I even won a can of seedless raspberry puree. Normally they meet at the Williamsburg Brewing Company. CASK is going to have a booth at Club night at the National Homebrewers Conference in June. I'll probably be giving them a hand there.
I ordered my All-Grain brewing system. But unfortunately it's on backorder. Grrrrrr. Jenny's Red Ale will have to wait. I also have the urge to make a Raspberry Sour Brown Ale. I can't wait for it to get here.
Finally, after 5 months in the Persian Gulf and a month of transit time, I'm home.
I've registered for the
NHC in Baltimore this June. I'm REALLY looking forward to it because it'll give me a chance to see how competitions are. And will help me as I start entering competitions.
I've also decided to get
this all-grain brewing system when I get back. I can't wait to get home!!
Oh Yeah,
Jen has a new blog!
German court OKs sugar in beer despite 1516 purity lawA German brewer has won his battle against Reinheitsgebot, the country's 1516 beer purity law that limits beer ingredients to malted grain, hops, yeast and water.
More...
Still out to sea. Nothing going on really. Just work. I re-did the ship's
website. Obviously, I can't wait to get home again. I have plans to buy some new
brewing equipment and a
Media Center PC.
Happy New Year everyone!
Jen, please send me your e-mail current address.
If you saw my last post you'll know that I'm having some problems with Visual Studio. Well I tried all of the suggestions that the good folks who read this blog gave me and still the same problem. I can't open any ASP.NET projects or create any new ASP.NET projects. Windows Forms work fine. The error message says something to the effect of "Unable to open project because the web server isn't running, start the web server."
I uninstalled VS 2005 Beta already. I guess my next step is to re-install IIS and see what happens. I really don't want to have to re-install the whole OS because of the whole "registration process" being out to sea with no visits to homeport in the near future makes the process difficult. I can't hook my personal comuter up to the ships LAN and register over the net and we dont have the phone option either. Can you do that by e-mail?
I was about to ask if anyone had a suggestion or two to help deal with the abundance of comment spam we all seem to be experiencing lately. I see
Darrell is already doing the same.
The United States Postal Service is offering free packing materials to
spouses and families of military members who are deployed overseas. To
take advantage of this service call: 1-800-610-8734 and press 1 (for
English & then 3 for an operator) and they will send you free boxes, packing
materials, tape and mailing labels. These products are to be used to mail
care packages to service members.
The November issue of PC magazine has an interesting article on Windows XP Media Center 2005 and the machines that use it's features. I'm excited about this development because I already love my TiVo and the recorder features in XPMC are even better. You can record more than one TV show at a time (depending upon how many tuner cards are in your system), You can stream video to other devices, like TV's, laptops, handheld devices, even X-Box. But you have to buy a MCX (Media Center Extender, around $300) in some cases like your TV or X-Box, which basically hooks your device up to your LAN either via ethernet or WiFi.
I just received a copy of XP Media Center from Microsoft in my Action Pack update for October. I cant wait to get home to try it out. But the needs of the Navy come first of course.
Well it's been a month since we deployed and so far so good. The weather has been abismal. I usually do not get sea sick but during this last storm I was. We had to tie everything down so that items wouldn't go flying across the room as the ship rocked and rolled, including ourselves. If you werent on watch you were in your rack with the straps up to keep you from falling out.
I'm still out to sea. There's not much going on really. I'm getting qualified to do some different jobs. We onloaded 60 pallets of food the other day. OUCH! I'm still sore. ;-) I've been reading a lot of books on Computer Forensics. '
Incident Response' is really good so far, but I haven't finished it yet. I'll review it when I do.
I finished the
LAW309 course and I'm about to dig into LAW304. I have plans to get a forensic computer when we get back to the US so I can get some practice actually doing all of this stuff that I've been reading about. (My friends are probably thinking,
ANOTHER COMPUTER!?) This one is to take with me on the deployment.
Best wishes to
Haven and Dallas who are getting married really soon! I'm looking forward to the return of Haven's Blog and the story she's about to tell. *I really hate stalkers.*
The Summer Olympics are coming up in August. It'd be great if there were Olympic reports available on the Sports channel of my MSN Direct watch. It'd be even better if we could select which sports we'd like to follow. Fencing perhaps?